A key component of early intervention for children with delayed language acquisition is early assessment. Previous research has shown that English-learning infants’ sensitivity to lexical stress plays a role in their segmentation of words from fluent speech – a critical step to developing a lexicon. This study investigated the possibility that performance on a word stress discrimination task pr...

The regularity of stress patterns in a language depends on distributional stress regularity, which arises from the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, and durational stress regularity, which arises from the timing of syllables. Here we focus on distributional regularity, which depends on three factors. Lexical stress patterning refers to normal stress patterns within words; interlexic...

There is extensive evidence that the segmental (i.e., phonemic) layer of phonology is routinely activated during reading, but little is known about whether phonological activation extends beyond phonemes to subsegmental layers (which include articulatory information, such as voicing) and suprasegmental layers (which include prosodic information, such as lexical stress). In three proofreading ex...

There has been substantial progress in understanding the production of individual speech sounds. Much less is known about prosodic aspects of speech production. Lexical stress is the prosodic contrast between strong and weak syllables within single words (compare ‘INcense’ with ‘inCENSE’ in English). The ability to achieve stress contrastivity during speech production shows a protracted develop...

Native speakers of a lexical accent system (Russians) were tested on their second language (L2) acquisition of a phonological stress system (Polish). In Russian, a sizeable part of the lexicon is underlyingly marked for accents and claims on the position of default stress vary. This makes it interesting to investigate which L1 characteristics (distribution of lexical accents vs. phonological de...